For all the talk about a new era of risk management, a report from Oversight Systems suggests it's more that - just talk - than action.

According to the report, 68 per cent of companies said they had a chief executive with a holistic approach to risk management, and 58 per cent of executives said their company had an enterprise risk management approach.

That's the good news.

Less than half (41 per cent) reported having a widely agreed upon definition of risk and only one in three (33 per cent) had formally trained senior managers and business line managers to assess the likelihood of risk.

No surprises then that we have reports of US firms wasting billions of dollars through inefficient risk management practices.

All this echoes the blog entry I did two months ago on why organisations do risk management badly.

Usually it's too fragmented and more often than not, the different departments, from business continuity, to IT, to security fail to work together. Risk management, more often than not, can be all over the place.